The other day I had a look at Twitter’s response to the Australian political leaders’ appearances on ABC1’s citizen forum-style show Q&A – by looking at the #qanda hashtag. My last post focussed especially on the commentary about Julia Gillard’s performance – today, it’s Tony Abbott’s turn.
First, though: in comparing the volume of tweets across the two programmes I noted that the Twapperkeeper archive for Tony Abbott’s appearance had a number of crucial gaps – for several periods of up to ten minutes at a time, we’re simply missing tweets altogether. I’ve checked this with the good folks at Twapperkeeper, and I’m afraid the response is that there’s nothing that can be done to retrieve those tweets now – so we’ll have to make do with what we’ve got. In that light, I’ve re-done the side-by-side comparison of tweeting activity in response to both leaders, and – for illustration only – added in a ‘moving average’ trendline to extrapolate what volume we might have seen during those gaps in the Abbott tweetstream.
Very obviously, that trendline is only a very loose approximation – especially in those big gaps in the tweetstream, we could have missed some significant momentary spikes in activity (similarly, if Gillard’s tweetstream had blanked out for just a couple of minutes, we could have missed her spike around 21:53, for example…). Still, if that extrapolated trendline is even just in the general ballpark, Abbott’s average during the programme would seem to be around the mid-500s, while Gillard’s is in the mid-300s.
In looking at what was tweeted during Abbott’s appearance, then, we’re obviously dealing with an incomplete sample. That’s not to say it’s not substantial in its own right – even in spite of the gaps, we’re counting 17520 tweets between 9 p.m. and midnight for Abbott, against 23868 for Gillard. So, for its obvious flaws, there’s still useful information to be extracted from it.
With those caveats, let’s move on to the top keywords in tweets between 9 p.m. and 12 a.m.:
And the most common multi-word phrases:
| FREQUENCY | |
| TONY ABBOTT | 890 |
| CLIMATE CHANGE | 433 |
| FRIENDS ARE | 340 |
| MR RABBIT | 316 |
| MR ABBOTT | 303 |
| STOP THE | 259 |
| TONY JONES | 219 |
| BOAT PEOPLE | 217 |
| ABBOTT IS | 210 |
| GAY MARRIAGE | 181 |
| BEAUTY AND THE GEEK | 174 |
| NA NA NA NA | 174 |
| VOTE FOR | 168 |
| TALK ABOUT | 155 |
| STOP THE BOAT | 150 |
| QANDA IS | 144 |
| LACK OF | 143 |
| PARENTAL LEAVE | 141 |
| NA NA NA NA NA | 139 |
| KEVIN RUDD | 138 |
| BASED ON | 137 |
| PEOPLE SMUGGLER | 135 |
| APPEAL TO | 131 |
| PEOPLE A | 129 |
| GAY PEOPLE | 129 |
| CHRISTIAN SIDE BY DRESSING BOAT PEOPLE A | 125 |
| BOAT PEOPLE A TWO OF EACH ANIMAL | 125 |
| SIDE BY DRESSING BOAT PEOPLE A TWO | 125 |
| DRESSING BOAT PEOPLE A TWO OF EACH | 125 |
Some interesting phenomena to observe here. First, and I’m not sure what to read into this: notice who’s absent from this list? Yes, Julia Gillard was mentioned only 68 times by her full name on Abbott’s night, while Tony Abbott’s full name appeared a whopping 392 times when Gillard appeared on Q&A. Now, of course they were each referred to a good deal more often by their respective first and last names (‘Gillard’ appears 298 times in Abbott’s tweetstream), but still that discrepancy strikes me as unusual – it’s not like ‘Julia Gillard’ is notably harder (or longer) to tweet than ‘Tony Abbott’, so we should expect their full names to appear with relatively similar frequency in their tweetstreams.
One possible reading of this, then, is that when Abbott was on Q&A, the discussion was all about him and his political views; when Gillard was on, the discussion focussed more on the contest between them.
Also of interest: ‘climate change’ leads the pack, and almost completely without the help of substantial retweets – all of the key phrases we observed on Gillard’s night rated so highly because one or two tweets were retweeted quite frequently, but here, we really do have nearly individual 433 tweets mentioning climate change: only two tweets managed to clock up ten retweets each. Can we infer from this that people really do strongly oppose Abbott’s scepticism towards the established scientific consensus on climate change?
For quite a few of the other high-ranking phrases, the story is very different. The 340 tweets containing the phrase ‘friends are’ are largely variations on the line ‘some of my best friends are gay’, or indeed retweets of its extensions
RT @HyperBrendan: "some of my best friends are non-smoking gay boat arriving muslims" #qanda
RT @marcfennell: "some of my best friends are chainsmoking homosexual illegal islamic arts patrons" #qanda
with 39 and a whopping 96 retweets, respectively. It might be worth noting that in these tweets, we’re dealing with a different kind of joke, compared to the major retweets we saw during Gillard’s Q&A experience: the ones above are inherently directed at Abbott, by inference painting him as homophobic and laughing at him, while significant retweets from Gillard’s night such as
‘How big a tool is Mark Latham?’ ‘There are some things that can’t be measured?’ #qanda
are laughing with Gillard (and at Latham), and
RT @safran_john: Idea for Refugee advocates: humanise boat people by calling them boat peeps. #qanda
is, if anything, criticising both candidates in equal measure.
Similarly, that ‘Mr Rabbit’ narrowly beat ‘Mr Abbott’ surely points to the fact that a substantial portion of the Q&A audience has stopped taking Tony Abbott seriously. Sure, it’s not as easy to meaningfully mispronounce ‘Gillard’ as it is ‘Abbott’ – but at any rate, the ‘Rabbit’ tag has stuck.
The story doesn’t get much better for Abbott further down the order, either. ‘Stop the’ (boats, of course) ranks so highly because of another one of those equal-opportunity comedy tweets, this time from comedian Corinne Grant:
RT @corinne_grant: Over 50000 people overstay their tourist visas every year. Bugger stopping the boats stop the backpackers! #qanda
Not to be outdone, John Safran gets another shot in, too:
RT @safran_john: People smugglers: Appeal to Tony’s Christian side by dressing boat people as two of each animal #qanda
But Abbott’s reference to picking up the phone to speak to the commander of any navy ship dealing with people smugglers turned the derision squarely on to him. You might have noticed that strange phrase ‘na na na na’ just outside the top ten – so let’s expand it to its full glory:
RT @crazyjane13: You know what would be BRILLIANT? If the #qanda audience spontaneously broke into a chant of ‘Na na na na na na na na BOATPHONE!’
(Indeed, the hashtag #boatphone which resulted from this exchange turned into a short-lived Twitter meme of its own during the following day…)
Quite a few tweets were also directed at Abbott’s apparently contradictory positions on same-sex marriage and the role of religious beliefs in political decisions:
RT @barrybonanza: SO WHY DON’T YOU SUPPORT GAY MARRIAGE if you don’t let religion influence your work #qanda
and
RT @downesy: "I have never made a decision based on a religious value." So what’s the grounds for opposing gay marriage? #qanda
were both retweeted a number of times. In the same context, we should also note that the phrase ‘vote for’ appears not mainly because of Twitter users stating that they’ll vote for Abbott (or not), but in response to a question by Q&A studio audience member Geoff Thomas:
GEOFF THOMAS: Thank you. I am a Vietnam veteran, I have been a plumbing contractor for 37 years and I support, with a social conscience, the Liberal philosophy. I have a gay son. When I was confronted with that situation in a very short amount of time and with due consideration I accepted his position and I overcame my ignorance and my fear of gays and the idea of gay marriage. When will you, Mr Abbott, take up the same – when will you, sir, overcome your fear and ignorance of gay people and give them the dignity and respect that you’d happily give to all other Australians?
Typical reactions on by #qanda Twitterers:
RT @MoreOj: Geoff … my vote for Father of the Year #qanda
RT @audreyapple: Vietnam Vet with the gay son gets my vote for Most Excellent Father Of The Year #qanda
Indeed, Tony Abbott’s religious views appear in a few other places in the data, too, though not always very obviously. It’s only when you explore the apparently commonplace phrases ‘lack of’ and ‘based on’ that you identify the substantial retweets they’re occurring in:
RT @ashdonaldson: Athiests [sic] have a lack of convictions because they don’t believe in a man in the sky pulling the strings? #ignorant #qanda
(a sentiment also appearing in a few other variations in many other tweets), and
RT @kedgie: "I have never made a decision based on my religion" RU486 RU486 RU486. Liar #qanda
– which also explains why ‘RU’ comes in at #13 on the keyword chart: it’s not ‘RU’ as in ‘r u serious’, though that’s a fair guess, but ‘RU’ as in the morning-after pill, RU486.
All in all, and even remembering that we’re missing a good chunk of tweets from the night (though there’s no reason to suggest that those tweets should be significant more or less positive than the ones we do have), I think it’s fair to say that this lot of #qanda tweets seems to be a lot more focussed on Abbott’s negatives, compared with Gillard’s appearance on the show: he’s frequently called ‘ignorant’, a ‘liar’, pilloried as naïve (the ‘#boatphone’ meme) and as a homophobe.
By contrast, it seems to me that Gillard’s audience was certainly critical (especially of her stance on same-sex marriage), but prepared to argue with her, while in Abbott’s case, they’re much more ready to dismiss his views as outdated and contradictory from the outset. Whether that attitude is in any way representative of the wider electorate – well, we’ll see in a few days.
Finally, just in case you were wondering – ‘Kevin Rudd’ appears prominently in the list mainly because of Twitter’s response to the Rudd impersonator in the audience:
RT @domknight: Could Bill Shorten and Mark Arbib please knife the Kevin Rudd impersonator immediately? #qanda
and ‘Beauty and the Geek’ is another reference to an audience member:
pleased to see xenogene from beauty and the geek on #qanda tonight
Interestingly, though, this one truly is a case of like minds thinking alike: amongst the 174 tweets mentioning the resemblance, there are very few retweets. Looks like there’s a substantial crossover in audience between Q&A and B&G, in other words, if so many people noted the resemblance independently – who would have thought?
And finally, though I’m not sure it really tells us all that much, here’s a quick map of the keywords and how they relate to one another (i.e. how they occur together in the corpus of tweets). I’ll probably do these again properly some other time, so don’t read too much into them, please…